Matt and Mara
directed by Kazik Radwanski
starring Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson, and Mounir Al Shami
MDFF Films and Cinema Guild
Nina Blume: Are you happy?
Stephen Blume: I’m just not miserable. What more could anybody ask for?
For now, let’s call it an elevated ennui. That’s the best way we can assess the mood of Stephen Blume, the central figure of Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, as he utters the above in response to his adoring wife Nina’s simple ask. Stephen is the epitome of the early 1970s elevated ennui. On appearance, he is a figure to be envied. A successful businessman with a lovely home and a caring wife, Stephen should be happy, but from the onset, by means of a clumsy extramarital affair, we know that Stephen is desperately unhappy in his own skin.
It’s an extreme introduction, but what follows in Blume in Love is Stephen’s neurotic journey through the weeds that inevitably steamrolls through two other lives. For us, Mazursky, more than any of the other American auteur directors of his era, keenly understood the flailing of his peers.
Arriving a tick over fifty years after Mazursky’s cinematic gut check on his generation’s malaise over seemingly having it all, Matt and Mara examines Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s peers with a similar scrutiny. Subtly chaotic and delightfully uncomfortable, Matt and Mara presents an existential romantic dilemma that is emblematic of our age.
Radwanski abruptly introduces us to the Stephen Blume of his feature, Mara (Deragh Campbell), a college poetry professor, as she is held up in conversation before teaching her next class by Matt (Matt Johnson), an aggressively charming novelist and old friend of Mara’s who is visiting from New York City. They frantically chat, with only Mara conscious of the students piled up in front of the classroom door. Surprised to see him, Mara makes a sketchy plan to follow up with Matt via email and says goodbye, but as she begins to teach her class, he quietly walks into the room and awkwardly climbs into a seat, bringing an entranced smile to Mara’s face, a smile that immediately suggests that she relishes the impetuous nature of her slightly disheveled, funny friend.
This first scene is brief, but we can easily read volumes into who these people are and what they mean to each other, which is a testament to Campbell’s and Johnson’s considerable talents in creating and establishing a familiar rapport and Radwanski’s ability to wander in and out of the frame to make every exchange more meaningful. The fluid collaboration between these three, which we first admired in one of our favorite films of 2020, Anne at 13,000 Ft., has now transformed into a process that miraculously draws our empathy through a realistic lens despite the construction of characters who are wildly different in presentation, but who equally create an unintended distance between themselves and the world around them.
Matt and Mara are two sides of the same foibled creator of enigmatic wealth who vacillate between the blasé non-satisfaction of working in a rarified air and the search for people to breathe that rarified air with them on their own idiosyncratic terms. After Mara’s class, while catching up at a coffee shop, Matt describes his absurd approach to writing characters who are not himself and receives a sharp critique from Mara, which he graciously accepts. Soon after, once Matt promises to give her a safe space to share what she’s working on, Mara discusses the idea that is motivating her to come out of her writing hiatus: the concept of “a person who truly believes that they know nothing about themselves and that all of their desires are complete secrets from them and that these desires could be revealed at any moment and ruin her life.” Matt’s enthusiastic response around the timeliness of the idea and the increasingly louder music in the shop distract us away from the gravity of Mara’s words, but Radwanski embeds them into all of Mara’s following scenes, blurring the line between the writer and her subject of interest and establishing the film’s unsettling rhythm generated by Mara’s unpredictability.
Thus, when Matt and Mara cuts from the titular characters exiting the coffee shop to Mara returning home to her husband, Samir (Mounir Al Shami), a distractingly beautiful indie musician, and their infant daughter, we’re taken by surprise, because Mara made absolutely no mention of her family to Matt. Samir more than adequately fills the role as the perfect art couple complement to Mara, but in his presence, Mara is a completely different being. In the moments that we see the couple away from the eyes of others, they calmly play guitar with their infant child, make small talk prepping dinner, and go through the motions of a peaceful young family. Emotionally, Samir is consistently placid in his demeanor, never argumentative, but also never deeply engaged, and she is mostly the same with him, suggesting either an underlying schism in their relationship that might soon bubble up to the surface, or oddly, an even more worrisome possibility that both have become accustomed and committed to their respective manifestations of the clichéd aloof artist — that withdrawn creative who has a hard time relating to people outside of their own medium — and both continue to live on without any expectation of great emotional attention from each other.
This hypothesis receives further proof when Mara admits that she is ambivalent about music in general to Samir’s musician friends at a dinner party; such a statement draws the polite ire of Samir’s friends, but only elicits a brief comment from Samir during their drive home. He agrees with his friends that it’s peculiar that his wife has little connection to his medium, but he’s not stirred by Mara’s lack of interest in music. And, in this opportune moment, Samir does not offer a thought or opinion on Mara’s medium, either.
In stark contrast, each time when Mara and Matt meet as the film proceeds, he showers her with adoration and attention while also encouraging her to step outside of her head. He wishes that Mara would attempt to overcome her inability/lack of desire to play the game of life a tiny bit and make herself accessible to others by means of something as easy as a smile, a trait that Matt himself has mastered, though with a certain amount of reluctance. According to Matt, Mara, who holds her emotions tightly, is “made of glass,” but Matt’s nervous extroverted behavior speaks volumes about his insecurity and insatiable need to be liked by others, especially as he encounters the people of Mara’s professional world: her colleagues, her students, and their shared peers. Though the pair might drastically differ in the way they approach strangers and acquaintances, there is a closeness that is achieved through their ability to talk openly, sometimes uncomfortably so, to each other, and Radwanski and cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov reinforce their intimacy by the way they hold them in shots throughout, whether they are walking on a sidewalk, sitting in a car, playing near a water fountain, attending a party with professors, or perusing a convenience store aisle together.
Though we are privy to only small hints of their past together as friends, we sense a more profound connection between Mara and Matt than between Mara and Samir. Mara and Matt know each other like no one will ever know them, and whether they are visiting Matt’s dying father or discussing Mara’s book idea, there is an unspoken, inherent understanding of the intention behind their expressed thoughts, which adds a great deal to every joke Matt utters and every thought Mara suspends. Regardless of the romantic ambiguity between them, Matt and Mara clearly have a profound relationship that spans years, and so, when Mara announces to Samir that her writer friend Matt’s father has died, leaving Samir to wonder if he had ever met Matt, it is a stunner. Is Matt a treasured keepsake for Mara, or have Mara and Samir never expressed any consequential aspect of themselves to each other during the entirety of their marriage?
By leaving so much unsaid or even said callously, Radwanski’s film evokes within us that nagging realization of a post-Covid zeitgeist where we find ourselves constantly wondering about the misalignment of our social interactions and relationships. The film then becomes a much needed reality check that makes us question our own connections to those around us, be it lovers or friends, and thus, Matt and Mara becomes vital to our psyche in the same way that Mazursky’s cinematic check-ins were vital during the post-love generation period in Blume in Love or at the height of the women’s movement in An Unmarried Woman.
Like Mazursky, the dialog of Radwanski’s film is an essential touchstone, but whereas divorce was the agent of change during the times of Mazursky’s aforementioned films, persistent inner tumult from the lack of knowing what one truly wants has become so indicative and constant that it is the comfortable baseline, not the precipitant, of today. All one has to do to see this shift is study the differences in the running scenes between the married couples in An Unmarried Woman and Matt and Mara. Those scenes of couples at odds both exhibit a clear break, but our couple’s break in An Unmarried Woman is verbal. Is Mazursky’s Martin’s accusation that Erica subconsciously led him into dog crap any less painful than Mara leaving Samir and his cramping leg in the dust? One does eventually lead to divorce and the other doesn’t, but do those outcomes even matter? Do they make the words that were/weren’t said in response any less uneasy? Well, we guess it depends on the era.
Matt and Mara is currently playing in Chicago and opens at Acropolis Cinema in Los Angeles on October 10, 2024, and Cleveland Cinematheque on October 26, 2024. Featured photo courtesy of MDFF Films and Cinema Guild.
